WEBVTT

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Just a short introduction, but--

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because I hate
long introductions,

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but Fanny is a special
person, so bear with me.

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Born in Buffalo, New
York, in 1940, Fanny Howe

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grew up in Boston.

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She is a mother of
three grown children

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and the author of more than 20
books of poetry and fiction.

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A winner of two NEA awards,
an American Book Award,

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and the Leonore
Marshall Poetry Prize,

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Howe's recent works
include Economics

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in 2002, and Selected
Poems, published in 2000.

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Howe has taught at many
prestigious universities,

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including Columbia,
Yale, and MIT.

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She recently retired, after
years of teaching literature

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at UC San Diego.

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Howe's work bangs,
and digs, and pushes.

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Reading her is equivalent
to being moved by a crowbar.

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Her fiction and poetry are laden
with both terror and compassion

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for the world, and the
depth of her questioning

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dictates her break with
traditional literary forms,

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and has classified her
an experimental writer.

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Sorry [INAUDIBLE].

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Reading Howe, at
this time of war,

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is devastating and liberating
because her words are not

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in avoidance.

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She wrestles some imagined
angel, animal, human down

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to her writing table, and makes
this presence / absence speak.

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Howe writes out
of contradiction,

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affirming both speech
and speechlessness.

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The place within the human
where G underline God slips in,

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G dash--

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or what is it, what's
the underscore d--

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thank you-- slips in,
unable to be spelled.

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The narrators of her poems
are mostly the disappeared.

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Perhaps this negation of
self accepting-- acceptance

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of suffering and knowledge
of negated ones-- especially

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people of color and
the poor-- flings us,

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her readers, out
into the unfairness

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and fairness of
our own existence.

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Prose says Howe bears more
guilt than poetry, always

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trying to justify itself.

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My impression is that
Howe's writing of fiction

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has enabled her not
to overload her poems.

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In fiction, she works
out of her own guilt,

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leaving room for
poems in which there

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is a sense of place after
guilt, perhaps where

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pure encountering begins.

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In a poem titled "Poems," she
writes, "caught in a war of yes

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against no stands pity.

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It never moves is
why you can't see it.

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There's some hung, as up
from a grassy serpent,

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makes pity look and look.

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Dread's at work
against, not for it.

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Dreads out hunting pulses,
but pity is the one

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that doesn't bat an eyelash.

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More static than static."

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There's war-- This is me again,
and I'm pity in this poem not

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dread--

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swallowed and static,
looking and looking.

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There's war, and Howe's
writing is dread.

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"She's a wicked poet,"
writes Quincy Troupe.

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Always shifting between the
social, the political, as well

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as linguistic and
literary concerns.

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One of the main characters in
Howe's novel, Saving History,

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is ironically, one might
think, named Felicity,

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because she suffers
throughout the novel when

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her child is dying.

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Yet this is one of the many
contradictions that makes

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Howe's writing live fiercely.

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There's no vindication
for the reader.

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You are left trapped
inside Howe's questioning.

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Yet fueled by the theme
of what some have called

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an exile of the
spirit in this world,

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and the painfully
exciting tiny margin,

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in which movement out
of exile is imaginable

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and perhaps possible.

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Howe's poems glimmer with
slim chances of hope.

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This is the wicked, the happy,
the pity, and the dread of what

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is Howe's vision.

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For the most part it
is enough for Howe

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to breathe, enough to make
each poem a sentence a day,

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something with a measurable
beginning and end.

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A balance, she says,
and aspiration.

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Her poems are lonely.

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So lonely, Howe says, she will
not title them and put the lid

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on the loneliness.

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There are mysteries
to her, the writer,

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and they are mysteries to us.

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Her poetry is a search
for soul, as lines

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unravel into the sky,
where time can't follow.

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Grief is penciled in, alongside
pursuits of luxury in which

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Howe implicates herself.

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I applaud Howe for upholding
ethical questioning.

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Her language implicates
the writer and the reader.

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Howe's poetry is not just
words, but a stance--

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a way of looking and living
in the world that ushers in

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anguish, quiet, bliss,
all in one bang.

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[APPLAUSE]

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